The cars will start piling into the Stamford Town Center around 10 a.m. on Saturday -- Meredith Keeler can predict from past experience -- and parking garage attendants will stay busy right through the close of business on Christmas Eve.

Then, and only then, Stamford's biggest retail center will be able to draw a comparison of the 2014 holiday shopping season to a year ago.

The Town Center collects anecdotal information from its retail and eatery tenants, said Keeler, the Taubman Centers general manager who runs the mall, and there is the old eyeball test of people bustling by with bags in hand. She trusts the eyes, but also wants to verify.

"While it's too early for us at this point to say how well this season is going to progress for us in 2014, (retailers) have been kind enough to share that the traffic has been up," Keeler said. "We had a really good year last year."

Taubman Centers owns a 50 percent share of Stamford Town Center via its Rich-Taubman joint venture. In June, the company reached a $1.4 billion deal with Greenwich-based Starwood Capital Group to sell off seven mall properties, none of them in the Northeast.

Taubman Centers does not break out the performance of individual malls in its quarterly or annual reports. In October, CEO Bobby Taubman stated that its properties on the whole were trending upward in their operating performance and that the company anticipated a successful holiday season.

Last week, the National Retail Federation said industry sales in November were up 0.6 percent from a year earlier -- a period that included Black Friday after Thanksgiving -- adding that was in line with NRF's prediction of a 4.1 percent increase for the holiday shopping season that kicked off that day. On Wednesday, an NRF-sponsored poll published by Prosper Insights & Analytics suggested the average shopper had completed nearly 53 percent of their shopping as of Dec. 10, up from 50 percent on that date last year.

Stamford Town Center got its own splash of publicity on Black Friday, after CNBC set up a set on the fourth level of the mall to broadcast the bustle.

Stamford Town Center elected not to follow the example of some area malls and ask retailers to stay open Thanksgiving all night in hopes of keeping the registers going, but Macy's and some other stores elected to keep the doors open on their own initiative into Black Friday.

Heading into this holiday season, Macy's was the last anchor store standing at Stamford Town Center, following Hudson Bay Co.'s decision not to renew its Saks Fifth Avenue lease there.

Hudson Bay also owns Lord & Taylor, which has a store in Stamford north of downtown. Spokespeople for Macy's and Hudson Bay could not be reached immediately for comment on whether the two stores have seen any increase in business this holiday season from people who might otherwise have shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue.

Keeler said she could not comment on Taubman Centers' efforts to find a replacement tenant for the Saks Fifth Avenue space. She added there is no capital construction campaign in the works that customers would notice, akin to the multimillion-dollar project Taubman Centers undertook this past year on its Westfarms mall on the West Hartford-Farmington line.

"I can tell you that our development team has been looking at a number of options for a replacement anchor strategy," Keeler said.

After Filene's closed shop in 2007, the mall created a restaurant row that Keeler credits with helping bring the mall more business. With Mitchell's Fish Market having shut down, Keeler provided no update on any timing for a replacement eatery, or when any announcement might be made on that front.

What she can say is that the cars will be rolling in -- and by extension the dollars -- for Stamford Town Center retailers starting Saturday, if not Friday night. For any retailers that may have suffered in the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, the holiday season of 2014 has been a welcome contrast.

"Historically, the busiest shopping weekend is the weekend we have just before Christmas," Keeler said. "We are really looking forward to this Saturday and Sunday, leading up to the last-minute crush."